sacrifice be on his wedding eve. Seen and listened to, "Cathleen ni
Houlihan" brings tears to the eyes and chokes the throat with sobs, so
intimately physical is the appeal of its pathos. He is, indeed, dull of
understanding or hard of heart who can witness a performance of this
play and not feel that something noble has come his way. It seizes hold
of the Irishmen of the patriotic societies as does "The Wearing of the
Green," and even the outlander, little sympathetic to the cause of
Ireland and holding patriotism a provincial thing, is moved in some
strange way he does not understand. Performance brings out its
homeliness, its touches of humor, its wistfulness, its nobility. It is
with this thought of its nobility that every thought of "Cathleen ni
Houlihan" ends, that is every thought of it on the stage. Off the stage
it is, except to him to whom the cause is all, something that falls
short of nobility, to many little more than eloquent allegory. In the
autumn of 1904 Miss Margaret Wycherly played "The Land of Heart's
Desire" and "Cathleen ni Houlihan" a few times in America, and "The
Countess Cathleen"; and "The Hour-Glass" (1903) and "A Pot of Broth"
(1902), both plays in prose. "The Hour-Glass," a morality, was written
after "Everyman" had won Mr. Yeats, and "A Pot of Broth" was written,
perhaps, to prove that its author could do farce.

[Illustration]

"The Hour-Glass" is based on a story that Mr. Yeats found in Lady
Wilde's "Ancient Legends of Ireland" (1887), the story of a wise man
who is saved from eternal damnation by the faith of a child. Mr. Yeats
leaves the wise man the great scholar that he was in the old tale, a
scholar whose teaching had taken away the faith of a countryside, but he
changes the child who saved the scholar into Teig the Fool, and infuses
into the record of the frantic hour, in which the wise man knows his
life ebbing away as the sand falls, a spirit that is as reverent as the
spirit of the old religious drama.

"A Pot of Broth" is a variant of a widely spread folk-tale in which a
beggarman tricks a provident housewife out of a meal. He pretends a
stone that he has, and which he gives her after his meal, makes good
broth, but it is her chicken that has made the broth. It is a trifle,
amusing enough, but remarkable chiefly for its difference from other
work of Mr. Yeats. There is little doubt, I take it, in the mind of any
one that it is not chiefly Lady Gregory's, as it surely is in i